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One of my most boomer gamer takes is that I really do not care at all what is shown in a game's pre-release hype cycle and that the people who fixate on and devour every aspect of them are strange.

I guess I don't disagree on that last point, but SV really does not shy away from nonconforming gender presentation or body types. So much so that one of my takeaways from playing it was "that had a little more gay energy than I expected, going in" (laudatory). And that's even putting aside...

Idk, not really sure how you can encounter a major character like Penny, who's about as androgynous as humanly possible and whose ace tera Pokemon is Sylveon, and not walk away from that thinking that there's at least some kind of subtext going on.

It really shouldn't go understated that the Pokemon profs are just sending 10 year olds out into the wilderness to do a bunch of dangerous unpaid field research for them. Quite the racket. They have nobody but themselves to blame that so many of the Pokedex entries have wildly fantastical...

It's just funny when this clashes in a playthrough where the player character is steamrolling with tryhard high-BST / legends. It's one of those cases that's prime for narrative dissonance, like when Oak scolds Blue for not caring about his Pokemon at the end of RBY despite nothing in the game...

Gonna be honest. Your last two posts come off like the presumptuous sort of reading-between-the-lines that makes me sympathetic toward any game developer who never wants to do an interview with anybody ever.

The Arceus encounter in DPPt is cool because the combination of the Hall of Origin music and the fact that the key item was never released gives it a very strong "you're not supposed to be here" vibe.

Yeah Megas are so fundamentally silly that it's just not worth getting worked up over any specific one.

Capcom fighters are an especially amusing category for this kind of stuff because they're one place where you often *don't* have to guess what the intent is. They tend to make it very explicit. The Saturn version of Street Fighter Zero 3 has option toggles for video format (RGB vs Video, which...

I think it's a good example of something that is more common than certain retro game "purists" would like to admit: sometimes the designers are just shipping something that's "good enough" rather than meticulously crafting every facet of a game with purpose and intent. Or, sometimes details are...

I am rather familiar with several second-hand accounts of Sega Saturn development. Retro Sega is kind of my main thing, and Sega of the mid 1990s basically followed an outdated philosophy of "release the hardware now and just have the programmers figure out the software as we go." Which was sort...

Homebrew exists for like every commercially successful platform, so I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. And 3D rendering? Yeah, I remember people trying to hype me up for Super Monkey Ball Jr, and the only thing I could think of while playing it was "jesus christ I wish I was playing...

The Game Gear (and Atari Lynx!) were ELEVEN YEARS OLD when Nintendo released the GBA. Yes I know a core pillar of the Game Boy line's design was "making the most of low-spec hardware," but that kind of time span was an eternity at that specific moment and the lack of a backlight in the 21st...

On the subject of GBA color balancing, I think the Game Boy Advance is the only console in history that I genuinely hated. It wasn't just that the launch model's screen lacked a backlight in the year of our lord 2001, while somehow making it harder to see than even its predecessors. It was also...

Being able to just chuck Pokeballs at water-dwelling species from the shore in recent games is a pretty major case of addition by subtraction.

I think they're "fine" at that specific job. It's not hard to notice that two different captures have different stats despite same species/level/nature combination, and tbh I like having some degree of technical obfuscation because I value the discovery process. The core problem with this...

This is why it's a good thing that Home cross-game transfers just straight-up wipe movesets now.

I'll actually take this a bit further and say that I don't know if there's a single champion that I like as a "character." Some are decently designed boss battles, but hardly any of them have an interesting impact on the story.

Yeah if anything it's nice to have a clear purpose for different classes of potions: efficiency-per-currency-spent and efficiency-per-turns-used. Ethers/Elixers have always been the item class that has stood out to me the most in terms of poor balance/design, and it's been that way from the...

I agree with this to the extent that gen 2 definitely had a vibe of waning enthusiasm. (Genwunners are a thing for a reason after all.) It's just that gen 3 was such a clean break from the prior games in multiple ways that it functioned as a clear offramp for that specific crowd.